


Scattered now before every planet

by glim



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 5 Times, Angst, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Catholic Bucky Barnes, Catholic Steve Rogers, Grief/Mourning, Inspired by Poetry, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Steve Rogers Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2019-04-29 05:49:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14466354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glim/pseuds/glim
Summary: Steve never learned how to say goodbye.(Spoilers for Infinity War.)





	Scattered now before every planet

**Author's Note:**

> Written for National Poetry Month. 
> 
> This fic also fills the 'unhappy ending' square on my Trope Bingo card for Round 10.
> 
> (Canon character death not tagged for spoiler reasons, but fic is compliant with IW.)

_i._

Bucky throws the envelope and its contents down on Sarah Rogers's old scrubbed wood table and shoves his hands in pockets, turns towards the last weak rays of winter sun slipping through the window. He's silent so long that Steve doesn't dare touch the paper or Bucky, not yet, not when the air between them is suspended and taut with an unfamiliar silence. 

"It means nothing," Buck mutters. His shoulders tighten beneath his shirt and Steve can see how he's holding his breath, how Bucky's defeated and defensive all at once for a moment, and how, a second later, he lets the breath out and straightens his shoulders. "I'll send you money for rent, and Ma money for groceries and bills. You still go eat Sunday dinner with them. Don't think you can get out of that just because I won't be around to keep the girls from bothering you."

"They don't bother me." Steve's voice is dry and loud in the darkening kitchen. "Buck--" 

Bucky's shoulders tighten up another notch and a memory flashes through Steve's mind of a ten-year old Bucky Barnes dragging Steve away from a fight they couldn't win, Bucky allowing himself one choked back sob over his swollen lip and bloody nose. 

That was the last time Steve saw Bucky cry, and even then, it was only a choked sound, a hitch of his shoulders, and the back of his right hand swiping the blood from his mouth. 

Steve's fingers brush the bent corner of the envelope and something like madness rushes up in his chest. What if he ripped it up? Tore the paper into tiny shreds and burned it into a handful of dust that he scattered over the mourning streets after dusk? Then what? How much of a sin would that be, how much of a penance would he have to serve?

 _Bless me father for I have sinned, it has been four weeks since my last confession._

Already the words run through his head, already he's sorry for the thought. For the anger and the envy and the unmitigated rush of loneliness, for the fear that threatens to choke him worse than any asthma attack. 

_I tore up my best friend's draft card. I tore it up and turned it into dry ash and dust so they wouldn't take him away from me. So I wouldn't be jealous of him. I love him and they're going to take him away from me, he's going to leave me behind. Just like everyone--_

"It means nothing," Bucky says again, but his voice dips low and uncertain. The breath he exhales is shaky, though, and when he turns around he reaches for Steve, folds his fingers around Steve's and pulls him in close. 

"It's nothing," Steve agrees, and buries his face in Bucky's chest. Nothing will ever the same again, nothing will ever be like this between them, close and quiet, the war a restless, unreachable yearning half a world away. "It means nothing..." 

It means everything, though; it means goodbye. 

 

_ii._

"I thought you were dead," Steve repeats, as if by saying the words aloud he can speak them out of existence, raze them from his own memory, and leave a pleasant blurring between the past and present. 

Only the past is a blur now, warm and pleasant: his mother's kitchen table shoved into the corner of their first apartment, Bucky's smile as he met Steve for their walk home after work, the sunrise from their fire escape during the hot summer months. 

And then, Bucky--

Always Bucky, his hands closing over Steve's when he couldn't catch his own breath quick enough, his lips pressed to the back of Steve's neck and his breath a hushed rasp as he pressed their bodies together in bed, his touch so warm as pleasure mounted between them Steve had to bite back cry after cry at how sweet it felt to know that no matter how far he fell into desire, Bucky would be there to catch him. 

And then, later, the letters, and the good-byes, piling up like autumn leaves on the kitchen table, dry and delicate. 

"I thought you you were dead," Steve says again and the present stands before him in the glaring, hard grey tones of wartime. 

"Me, too," Bucky says, but his eyes go blurry in an unsettling way and he shakes his head. "No, that's not right, because I knew as long as I remembered your name, as long as I could remember you and what it was like to say your name, then I was alright and I was alive." 

Steve shifts on the infirmary cot and reaches up to touch the edge of his index finger to the bruises on Bucky's face. He's too pale and too thin; the war has already etched a hardness into his features and turned the blue of his eyes the color of January ice. 

Steve knows this, too, that his own future has been redrawn by the war, dictated by terms set out by the words on the draft card that came in the mail so many lifetimes ago, tempered by his own need, by that flash of envy and then the fear that followed on its heels.

"Say it for me now," Steve interrupts his own thoughts, and pleads, "say it so I remember this, instead of--" 

"Steve," Bucky says and rests his hand against Steve's, lace their fingers together like he doesn't know how to let go anymore. " _Steve._ "

He'll remember this later, his name on Bucky's lips, whispered and soft, their eyes closed and breath barely brushing each other's mouths in a kiss. He'll remember it when there's nothing left in his ears but the whistle of the wind and the rush of the train through the mountains; when the ice and the snow bite at his lungs and the only words he has left for himself are those of a penance he fears he'll never complete, the only absolution he'll ever receive is the clean slate of snow falling over his body, his shield a marker for a soldier's unknown grave. 

 

_iii._

Two hours outside Pittsburgh and two weeks away from the destruction in Sokovia, Steve kneels down inside a quiet Catholic church to rest his forehead against his clasped hands. 

When he closes his eyes, he can smell wood polish and incense, can feel the scented smoke curl up from the censer and around his eyelashes and fingertips. Comfort crowds his heart, but there's an ache there, too, and Steve squeezes his eyes closed until all he can feel is the smoke-blurred memory of his past. 

When he opens his eyes, he hears careful, measured, familiar footsteps make their way up the side aisle. 

He's meant to hear them, he knows, and he takes comfort in that realization, too. Steve raises his head from his hands and glances aside; the day is cloudy and cool, weak sunlight scattering colored light from the stained glass windows onto the carpeted church floor. 

" _Introibo ad altare Dei_ ," the voice behind him recites the start of the Mass in quiet, clipped Church Latin, the sort spoken by altar servers who knew a little more of the language than the rest of the congregation. 

He always did; he always knew more than his parents and sisters, knew more than Steve, picked up it quickly as soon as the priest starting teaching him.

Steve's chest tightens again and the words feel wrong in his mouth as he says them, the meaning twisting like smoke and ash and winter snow in the wind. " _Ad Deum, qui laetificat juventutem meam._ " 

Two fingertips press to the nape of his neck; the touch is warm, firm, and familiar, and Steve's shoulders tense; at the back of his throat he tastes snow and ash, and a sob rises up from deep inside him. The cry catches in his chest, however, and sticks painfully there for a long, taut moment, and robs Steve of his breath. 

"It's not your fault." 

He aches all over save for where two warm fingertips touch the back of his neck and Steve's chest hitches with a retrained sob at the sound of the voice. If he turns around, he knows, the touch will disappear, the voice will fade away on silent footsteps, and he will be alone in this big, empty church with faint sunlight and the familiar scent of frankincense and myrrh choking his lungs. 

So Steve lowers his head to his hands again and revels in the faint touch against his neck, allows himself one single cry against it, and prays: 

_I miss you. I miss you and I love you and I lost you. I've watched you die a thousand times in my dreams over the past seventy years and yet, I've never learned to say goodbye. Forgive me for not saying goodbye, for not saving you._

The church is dark when Steve opens his eyes; the man in the pew behind him shifts, brushes his thumb against the nape of Steve's neck. 

"You'll find me. You'll know when to find me, and I'll wait for you, Steve," he murmurs, quiet and clipped, a benediction but not a farewell. He touches Steve's neck once more, then his hair, and then walks down the aisle and out into the evening chill.

 

 _iv._

Steve finds Bucky everywhere, finds his heart crowded with memories of long-lost letters and desperately whispered battlefield promises. 

"But you'll go home again," Bucky had murmured once upon a time, his lips against Steve's ear as they waited for the all-clear of a winter dawn. "It doesn't matter how many times you leave, I know you'll go home." 

Steve had turned away from Bucky with a small, sideways smile. "Sometimes I think I don't know or remember how to get there without you." 

He sees him in traffic lights and rain puddles, in the snarled streets of Europe and the littered back alleys of New York city; in the last, low whistle of a far away train and the bite of winter air against the tips of his fingers and ears. Steve finds Bucky in every moment and memory between New York City and Washington D.C., between Romania and Wakanda. 

"I want places to look forward to, someday," Steve says, and thinks, perhaps that's not a confession he should be allowed to make. Not after so long, and so many years, and so many long goodbyes. "Or, at least, I thought I did." 

"Here, then. Come home to me here," Bucky murmurs. He kisses Steve's forehead and slides his right hand down Steve's side, holding him close, then closer, until Steve closes his eyes and rests his own forehead against Bucky's. "That's all you have to remember, Steve, is that you're going to come home to me one day." 

Steve smiles, lowers his eyes and smiles for Bucky, the same way he would've in their old apartment, maybe a little shy and unsure, if he'd been able to come home the night before Bucky shipped out to England. He owes this to Bucky, now, and maybe to himself, to realize that every farewell is a cycle of memory and longing, of grief and the ever growing process of living. 

"I don't want to say goodbye." Steve squeezes his eyes shut like he did before, in an empty, cold church where he once knelt with the Winter Soldier. 

"Then don't. You never did, Steven," Bucky kisses him once, soft and silent, and kisses him again when Steve moves into the touch with a sound that is all quiet, remembered desire and need. 

"I thought you'd come home, too," Steve says, and he knows he sounds desperate and that there's the sadness of seventy years in his voice. 

"Hey..." Bucky pulls away, then reaches up to brush his thumb beneath Steve's eyes. "I did, just like I told you I would at the end of every letter I wrote you." 

"Right before you signed your name: _be home soon_. The war made you a sap," Steve jokes between tears and kisses. 

"Just for you. Maybe I wanted to make sure I had something to come home to," Bucky says and there's a light in his eyes that Steve hasn't seen in years and hadn't realized how much he missed until that very moment. 

 

_v._

Once, Steve had thought that the first goodbye was final; and then that the last one, after so many years, wouldn't feel like a knife slipped through his ribs, silent and sharp, or like the scattering of his own ashes over the banks and shoals of time, or the sound of his name fading into the wind, scattered in a handful of dust. 

It does, it did, it will.

**Author's Note:**

> I hear the grass never  
> saying a word. I hear it spreading its arms across  
> each grave & barely catch a name. My dying wish  
> is scattering now before every planet. I want places to  
> look forward to.
> 
> "The Past Suffers Too"  
> Ben Purkert
> 
> \---
> 
>  _Et introibo ad altare Dei: ad Deum qui lætificat juventutem meam._  
>  (And I will go to the altar of God; to God, who brings joy to my youth.) 
> 
> \---
> 
> And I will show you something different from either  
> Your shadow at morning striding behind you  
> Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;  
> I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
> 
>  _The Waste Land_  
>  T.S. Eliot


End file.
